PrayTimes.org

Code Manual

From Pray Times

Revision as of 07:44, 27 February 2009 by Admin (Talk | contribs)

PrayTimes is a small program providing a set of handy functions to calculate prayer times for any date and location, based on a variety of calculation methods currently used in Muslim communities.

PrayTimes is originally written in JavaScript. This manual provides information on how to use PrayTimes on a web-page or JavaScript-based widget to compute prayer times for any given time and location.


Contents

Download and Examples

Download:

Examples:

General Usage

The first step for using PrayTimes in a web-page or widget is to include it using a line like this: 

 <script type="text/javascript" src="prayTimes.js"></script>

After including prayTimes.js, an object named prayTimes is created and is ready to use. We can immediately get the prayer times (using the default settings) from this object. For example, to get today's prayer times for a location with latitude 43, longitude -80 and time zone -5, we can call: 

 prayTimes.getTimes(new Date(), [43, -80], -5);

There are several functions for adjusting calculation parameters. For example, we can call the following function (before calling getTimes) to change the calculation method to ISNA: 

 prayTimes.setMethod('ISNA');

Details of the functions available in PrayTimes along with their description are provided below.

Get Prayer Times

The following function is used to retrieve prayer times for a given date and location:

getTimes (date, coordinates, timezone, dst, format)

The input parameters are described below:

date
The date for which prayer times are calculated. You can use new Date() to specify today. Date can be also entered as a triple [year, month, day]. For example, [2009, 2, 26] specifies February 26, 2009.
coordinates
Specifies the coordinates of the input location as a triple [latitude, longitude, elevation]. Latitude is a real number between -90 and 90, longitude is between -180 and 180, and elevation is a positive number, specifying the height in meters with respect to the surrounding terrain. The elevation parameter is optional. Examples of valid coordinates are [-43.2, 80.6] and [12.5, -25.8, 300].
timezone
The difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours.
dst
Daylight Saving Time: 1 if date is in daylight saving time, 0 otherwise. If omitted, dst is assumed to be 0.
format
Output time format, according to the following table:
Format Description Example
24h 24-hour time format 16:45
12h 12-hour time format 4:45 pm
12hNS 12-hour format with no suffix   4:45
Float Floating point number 16.75

Return Value

getTimes return an associative array containing 9 prayer times (see here for the list of times and their definition). Each time can be accessed thorough its name. For example, if the output of getTimes function is stored in an object times, the time for sunrise can be accessed through times.sunrise.

Example 

 var times = prayTimes.getTimes(new Date(), [43, -80], -5);
 document.write('Sunrise : '+ times.sunrise)

Set Calculation Method

There are several conventions for calculating prayer times. The default convention used in PrayTimes is Muslim World League. You can change the calculation method using the following function:

setMethod (method)

method can be any of the followings:

Method Description
MWL Muslim World League
ISNA Islamic Society of North America
Egypt Egyptian General Authority of Survey
Makkah Umm al-Qura, Makkah
Karachi University of Islamic Sciences, Karachi
Jafari Shia Ithna Ashari (Ja`fari)
Tehran Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran


More information on the above calculation methods is provided here.


Example 

 prayTimes.setMethod('Makkah');

Adjusting Parameters

The calculating parameters can be adjusted using the following function:

adjust (parameters)

parameters is an associative array composed of any number of the following parameters:

Parameter Values Description Example  
imsak degrees   twilight angle 18
minutes minutes before fajr 10 min
fajr degrees twilight angle 15
zuhr minutes minutes after mid-day 1 min
asr method asr juristic method; see the table below Standard
factor shadow length factor for realizing asr 1.7
maghrib degrees twilight angle 4
minutes minutes after sunset 15 min
isha degrees twilight angle 18
minutes minutes after maghrib 90 min
midnight method midnight method; see the table below Standard
highLats method higher latitudes adjustment; see below None


asr methods
Method Description (more info)
Standard Shafii, Maliki, Jafari and Hanbali (shadow factor = 1)
Hanafi Hanafi school of tought (shadow factor = 2)


midnight methods
Method Description
Standard The middle of Sunset to Sunrise
Jafari The middle of Maghrib to Fajr


higher latitudes methods
Method Description (more info)
None No adjustments
NightMiddle The middle of the night method
OneSeventh The 1/7th of the night method
AngleBased The adaptive angle-based method


Example 

 prayTimes.adjust( {fajr: 16, zuhr: '5 min', asr: 'Hanafi', isha: 15} );


Tuning Times

You can further tune calculated prayer times (for precaution) using the following function:

tune (offsets)

offsets is an associative array containing time offsets in minutes for each prayer time.


Example 

 prayTimes.tune( {sunrise: -1, sunset: 3.5} );


Note 1.
By default, PrayTimes rounds minutes to the nearest values. To round a specific time up, you can tune it by +0.5, and to round it down, you can tune it by -0.5 minutes.
Note 2.
Tuning is the last step after calculating step, and thus, it has no effect on the calculation parameters. For example, if Isha is set to be 90 minutes after sunset, tuning sunset by 5 minutes will not push Isha forward.
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